How do you use LED grow lights for seedlings?

Indoor growing offers many advantages. You just need a marijuana grow tent! The biggest benefits are the most obvious: garden pests can’t get at your plants, and you have total control over the weather.

Yet unless you’re lucky enough to have a solarium or greenhouse attached to your home, providing sufficient light to your plants will likely be an obstacle (shade-tolerant houseplants excepted). South-facing windows may provide enough light for a tray or two of seedlings, but if you want to grow vegetables, or any other sun-loving plants, to maturity, you’re going to need grow lights.

The indoor lighting found in most homes does little to support photosynthesis.

Before you buy a light, you'll want to know if it's really necessary.

Let me tell you what all experienced gardeners know: seedlings are so hard to start indoors with natural light. Even with a sunny window, they only get partial light and you can't control it.

Even if you got your seeds to sprout and they seem healthy, they probably didn't grow to maturity. This is because they spend all their energy growing towards the sun instead of developing. They burn themselves out before they can get started!

Using a grow light to start your plants inside takes so much guess work out of growing. Whether these sprouts will end up in the garden or stay inside forever, using a light will make all the difference. Led grow lights for seedlings is important!

The spectrum that your grow lights emit is very important and it can get pretty technical. I'll give you the overview you'll need for growing seedlings and you can follow these links if you want to learn more.

You'll see that many LED grow lights emit in the red and blue spectrum. This is because plants evolved to use red and blue wavelengths most efficiently. You can actually control whether a plant uses its energy for growth or flowering by controlling the spectrum.

A plant exposed to blue light only will spend that energy on growing and building it's roots. This is called the Veg stage.

Veg is most important early in a plant's life. Blue light is thought to be good for seedlings. But if you keep an indoor plant under a blue LED for all of it's life it won't grow to its full potential.

• Rotate your plants each week. The light from a fluorescent bulb is more intense at the center of the bulb than it is at the ends.


• Replace fluorescent tubes when the ends darken. That means the tube is old and the light output may be less than half of a new bulb.


• Clean your fluorescent bulbs each month. Dust and dirt can dramatically decrease the amount of light emitted.


• Place your hand where the light hits the foliage. If you feel any warmth, the light is too close.


• Move the lamp upward as the seedlings grow; you want to keep the lights about 2-4 inches above the plants.

How long do new seedlings need light? For the first three to four weeks, leave the light on for at least 18 hours.

After the first month you can decrease light exposure to 10-14 hours a day. Plants that need a lot of direct sun like peppers and tomatoes should be on the higher end of that spectrum. Plants that prefer a little less light can get by with closer to 10 hours or even 8 hours.

If you bought an LED light with a timing feature it's easy to set to ensure your new plants get the right amount of light every day.

If your light doesn't have a timer, you can buy an outlet timer that will turn power on and off on a schedule.

This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.

That’s when I decided it was time to buy myself some grow lights, and I was amazed at what a difference it made!

Not only did my seedlings look fantastic, but adding a few grow lights meant I didn’t need to grow as many seeds because my seedlings were much healthier and stronger.

With proper seedling lighting, their survival rate was much higher, so I didn’t have to plant extra seeds to make up for that like I did in the past.

My grow lights definitely paid for themselves pretty quickly (since there was much less waste of seeds and dirt… and my time), and they continue to pay for themselves over the years.

Not to mention using lighting for seedlings have made my life much easier, and taken the frustration out of growing seeds.

BENEFIT 1: STRONG, HEALTHY SEEDLINGS

The main benefit of using grow lights for seedlings is that your seedlings will be much stronger and stay more compact when they get enough light.

Proper seedling lighting is the the only thing that will prevent leggy seedlings, and thick, strong seedlings have a much better chance of surviving the transition to the garden in the spring.

BENEFIT 2: GROW YOUR SEEDS ANYWHERE IN THE HOUSE

Another benefit of using lighting for seedlings is that you can grow your seedlings anywhere in the house, you don’t need to worry about keeping them in a room that gets natural light.

This is a huge benefit for many gardeners, since most people don’t have huge sunny windows to grow seedlings in.

Plus you can hide your ugly seed starting setup away in a back bedroom, in the basement, or even in a dark closet if that’s the only space you have.

Without grow lights, it would be impossible for many people to start seeds indoors.

All green plants require light to perform photosythesis, during which special cells convert the energy contained in the light into sugars. In the process, plants give off oxygen.

Plants vary widely in how much light they need to thrive — from low-light houseplants, such as dracaenas, to fruiting edibles, such as tomatoes, that need much brighter light.

Seedlings require lots of bright light, and when they don't receive enough they get weak and leggy. For a plant growth, full spectrum LED grow light can be your good choice!